Use rlwrap to wrap command line apps with readline

rlwrap wraps any command line utility with the GNU readline library, which gives you history and Emacs-style keyboard commands for line editing that you'd get with anything that uses the readline library (such as the Bash shell).

I started using it with Oracle's SQL*Plus command-line utility which lacks history and decent editing capabilities. rlwrap makes it much more pleasant to use.

There is a package for rlwrap in Ubuntu 9.04, so it is likely to be in other recent Linux distros. If you're on Mac OS X, Fink has a package for this. If you're on Windows, it looks like there is a package for Cygwin.